Quantum Attraction
by BeatnikFreak
Summary: Whoever said physicists were boring? Meet Prof Bella Swan, head of her department at the LHC, and get to know the eccentric transfer researcher, the bizarre Brit Edward Cullen, as particles smash and hearts... collide? Will be M later.


**Afternoon.**

**I have no real clue what prompted this. Suffice it to say, my exams and work experience just finished, and I've got seven weeks of summer holiday staring me in the face.**

**Let's hope you like it.**

**Welcome to: Quantum Attraction.**

***BeatnikFreak***

One - Decisions, Decisions

BPOV

"Fuckity fuck fuck," I swore as I struggled through the door with a stack of papers and a takeaway coffee cup. One of these days, I was going to have to stop carrying so much stuff around.

"Morning, Professor Swan!" chirped Jane from behind the desk. I vaguely nodded at her as best I could with my chin wedging down a physics journal three hundred pages thick.

Seeing one of the lifts had its doors open, I gracelessly ran towards it and staggered through just as they began to shut.

"One of these days, Bella, you are going to misjudge the timing of your lift run, and you will get mashed," sighed Angela, in German-accented English. "And then what use will that PhD be to you?"

I smiled. "You know me, I like to live on the edge."

We both laughed; I was famous for being cautious to the extreme.

The lift dinged, signalling my floor. "See you at lunch, or something, Ange," I said, before stumbling out into the lobby.

I bashed down the corridor in between offices before reaching my own. I fell through the door, only regaining my balance by shoving my hip into the furniture. I slammed down the huge pile of stuff onto my desk with a huge sigh.

"Man, Bella, maybe you should just get a trolley, or something," laughed a voice. I looked up, and saw Jacob Black, one of the technicians and a friend of mine.

"Don't you have somewhere to be other than mocking me?" I snarked back, shuffling few some papers, then looking up at him.

He held up his hands. "All right, all right, I get the idea, noone wants Jake around. I'll get out of your professor's office before I dirty the carpet." He pretended to sniff, then started out the door.

Just before he left, he turned back, and threw me a muffin."Not that you deserve it."

"I love you!" I yelled after him.

"I know!" he called back, his heavy footfalls carrying along the corridor.

I settled back in my chair, and began sorting through all the papers I'd brought with me from home. I needed to read through a couple of reports from the health and safety people before I next went down to the collider, boring stuff but necessary...

Half an hour later, I was still staring at the front page of 'Possible hazards in underground environments'. Gah.

I decided to look at that later, and moved on to something much more interesting. I opened up a file and began to read.

To anyone who wasn't a physicist, what I was looking at probably looked like a page of random numbers. To me, it was everything I'd ever dreamed.

About an hour later, I finished checking through the pages of results. Nothing particularly exciting, just standard quark interactions.

I drummed my fingers on the desk. I needed the clock to speed up a bit. I had an important appointment at twelve o' clock, with Professor Aro.

The phone rang a minute later.

"Professor Swan speaking, CERN office 242," I said briskly into the phone.

"'Allo, this is Jacques Dupont, from the Annecy Gymnasium," replied a heavily accented French voice. I switched to French, blessing my mother's heritage.

"Ah, bonjour Jacques. Comment ca va?"

"Bien, merci, et toi?"

"Bon, merci. Alors, comment peux-je aider-vous aujourd'hui?"

Jacques was the head of physics at a classy school in Annecy in France; I'd liased with him a few times in the past, for work experience placements for some of his more gifted pupils.

"Deux choses. J'ai un fils qui veut etre physiciste, mais il n'est pas sur quelle branche de la sujet il choisirait - as-tu conseils?"

"Ah, oui. Franchement, ca depend de le type de person il est." I went on to describe to him a couple of ways this boy could decide on what branch of physics to choose.

"Merci. En plus, nous avons une fille en seconde qui est surdoue, et elle veut etre physiciste comme toi et tes collegues - as-tu un stage pour elle ce Paques?"

I quickly flicked through my calendar. Easter... so far, no placements.

"Alors, nous n'avons pas d'enfants ce Paques en ce moment, donc j'espere que je lui peux donne un stage. Quand je suis sur, je t'envoyerais une message, oui?"

"Oui, merci beaucoup."

"Pas de probleme, Jacques. Au revoir."

"Au revoir, Bella."

I hung up, making a note to check with the schools liason officer about availability. Then I looked at the clock.

Ten thirty. God, kill me now.

I killed forty five minutes by sending all the emails I had been meaning to, as well as reorganising my desk drawers, but then I was stuck. I wasn't due to go down to the computers or the collider until after lunch because of my appointment, so I was practically climbing my office walls.

Luckily, someone came by to save me.

A knock sounded at my door. "Come in," I yelled, probably louder than necessary.

"Rosalie!"

"Bonjour, bitchface," she greeted me. "Figured you'd be clawing at the walls by now, so I thought I'd treat you to coffee."

"Rosalie Hale, I have never loved anyone like I love you. Except for Michael McConaughey, but that's between me and him."

We idly chatted as we walked out of my building along to the site restaurant. I would be forever glad that my department was situated close to the food. Saved me driving every time I got the munchies.

Rosalie was half Swiss, half American, brought up between her divorced parents, so she'd spent her summers in Lake Lucerne, whilst being schooled in the Upper East Side. You'd only know she wasn't pure Manhattan when she spoke French - she spoke in the dialect that few non-natives could understand.

"So, big appointment today," she commented as we queued for coffee.

"Just a bit," I replied, edgily.

She put a manicured hand on my arm. "Calm down. You'll be fine."

I turned one side of my mouth up in a smile. "Some hope."

Rose quickly ordered coffee and cake, before picking up the tray and making a beeline for a table by the windows. God knew why, the only view was an access road and some CERN-branded Peugeots.

We sat down, me perhaps more heavily.

"So what's the deal with you and McCarty?" I asked, taking a sip of my coffee. Emmett McCarty was an American, working on the ALICE collider as well as Rose, but on a slightly different parts of an experiment. He was all about electrons, whereas she was working on muons presently. However, as was to be expected in such a complicated branch of physics, and a combined experiment, the pair did overlap pretty regularly.

"I don't know what you're talking about." She shoved a piece of cake in her mouth. I kept eyeing her. "What?" she exclaimed through a mouthful of chocolate.

I raised my eyebrows. "I have it from a reliable source that the pair of you were seen making eyes at each other over a set of muon spectrometers."

"And what reliable source would this be?"

I leant back in my chair. "Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," I smiled.

"Prof Swan," called a voice from the other end of the canteen. I looked around.

"Hi, Professor," I greeted Banner. He was a kindly man, if somewhat harrassed-looking most of the time. He came walking in that funny way of his up to me.

"I'm glad I caught you before your appointment." I raised my eyebrows, not sure where this was going. "Can I ask a massive favour of you, Isabella?"

Uh oh, first names.

"Sure," I sighed. "What's the deal?"

"Ah, I knew I could count on you. We've got a new professor coming in to work on your collider, from England - I'm sure you got the memo-"

I vaguely remembered that missive.

"I was wondering if you could show him around? From what I hear, he's shockingly intelligent, but a bit ... odd." He shrugged apologetically. "He's a pioneer in M-Theory."

Ah, now I DID remember properly.

"Oh, the Brit?"

Banner nodded eagerly, clearly relieved I had remembered. "Yes, the one from Oxford. Previously worked at ISIS?"

"Oh, right. When does he arrive?"

I saw the suckerpunch coming.

"Twelve fifteen."

_Gahhhhhhhhhh._

"Right..."

Banner turned pleading. "I'm sorry to ask you, Isabella, but seeing as he'll be working in tandem with you and your team, I thought it best - "

I waved my hand in resignation. "It's fine, I've got it covered. Just tell him to wait down in reception until I get there, okay?"

"Thank you, Isabella," he said fervently. "I owe you for this."

"It's cool, Professor."

"He DEFINITELY owes you that project now," Rose commented.

~#~

"Bella, please come in," asked Professor Alistair Kenworthy. Professor Doctor Alistair Kenworthy, PhD, MPhys, BsC, MA, plus whatever other letters you could shove on the end of his name. Renowned physicist - and the man in whose hands the fate of my pet project lay.

I sat down in the comfy chair in front of his desk.

"So, Bella, what exactly was it you wanted to talk to me about?"

I took a deep breath. "I have a proposal for an experiment, Professor."

He cocked his head to one side, appraising me. "Yes?"

"I'm sure you're aware of the current experiments at Fermilab, where they've found top quark assymetry?"

He nodded, which I took as a sign to continue.

"Okay, at ATLAS, we're running lots of experiments to try and find whatever particles we can. My proposal is that we build on the idea of top quark assymetry, and start colliding anti particles to see what the deal is with the anti-top quarks. As difficult as it is for me to admit that the Standard Model is wrong, I think it's very possible that an axigluon DOES exist. And, if there's an axi gluon -"

"Is there an anti-axigluon?"

I leant forward in my seat. "Exactly. Furthermore, I think that combining data from the different collisions may present us with either a constant - "

"Or an absence!" I thanked heaven that he understood. Not that I'd expected him to not understand.

"Exactly." I sat back.

"Bella... I think - and this is only a 'think' - that you could be onto something. How would you propose the method of these collisions?"

I spent five minutes, with the aid of a pencil and a PostIt, explaining how I thought we could carry out my experiments.

After that, Alistair leaned back in his leather chair. "Bella, what your experiment proposes could - _could_ - be another baby step towards finding a unified theory. Let's be frank: if you find a particle, one of the ones we think we will, or even if you find something which hints at one of them, or hints at a hint of them, you've possibly begun to prove Feynman right. If you don't - if you find something ELSE - well, then, who knows." He looked over the top of his glasses at me. "You're an M-theory fan, yes?"

"I dabble," I replied, half smiling.

"Well, maybe you'll find something that hints at other dimensions. I don't know. None of us knows."

I held his gaze, praying to the ghost of Erwin Schrodinger.

"Hmmm... Okay, Bella, I like the idea. I'm behind you. But I'll have to get approval from the high-ups, you know how it is." I nodded. "It could take a while."

"Fine by me."

"Speaking off the record here, I will do my utmost to get the big three to approve it. You're one of our best here at CERN, and I have real faith in this project. I genuinely think I can get them to say yes." He smiled, and I remembered one other thing from his resume.

_Alistair Kenworthy, hellraiser._

I smiled widely. "Thank you, Alistair." Inside, I was screaming.

~#~

I left the office a minute later, after signing all the standard research proposal forms, and promising to do a full write up of my idea for Alistair.

I walked calmly away from the door until I thought I was out of earshot, then I yelled.

"YES! COME _ON_!"

Embodied by the spirit of god knows who, I started dancing down the corridor, whilst humming the opening to Living On A Prayer.

"My experiment's the one, it's the one they want, ooh hoo hoo, honey!" I sang, badly, as I jived into the reception area. I switched songs, whooping in a misguided John Travolta impression "Asymmetry's electrifyin'!"

I did a little spin on the spot - then came face to face with the man who was sitting in a chair in the waiting area. The very handsome man who was sitting in a chair in the waiting area. The very handsome man who was sitting in a chair in the waiting area staring at me.

I looked at the clock on the wall.

Twelve seventeen.

_Fuck._

**So, how was that for a first chapter?**

**The science in this is accurate, although Bella's experiment is a fictional one. I am assured, though, by Particle Zoo and New Scientist, that it would, in theory, work.**

**I figured you lot are going to want some explanation of the science involved in this, but I don't want to make the story completely inaccessible, so here's a brief rundown of what's in this chapter.**

**Quarks: subatomic particles. There are six types, in pairs: up and down, top and bottom, strange and charm. (I have a bit of a soft spot for the strange ones.)**

**Muons: The muon ****is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with a unitary negative electric charge and a spin of ****½. Together with the electron, the tau, and the three neutrinos, it is classified as a lepton. It is an unstable subatomic particle with a mean lifetime of (2.2 µs), compared to that of a free neutron (~15 minutes), a free proton at greater than 6.6×1033 years (possibly infinite), and that of an electron, also possibly infinite. Like all elementary particles, the muon has a corresponding antiparticle of opposite charge but equal mass and spin: the antimuon (also called a positive muon). **

**Standard model of particle physics: http: / . org / wiki / Standard_model_of_particle_physics **

**M-Theory: http: / en. wikipedia. org/ wiki / M-theory**

**The experiments at Fermilab are actually real: if you're interested in top quark assymetry, check out the issue of New Scientist from around May 4th this year. It's absolutely fascinating. *happyspaz***

**Songs for this chapter: Islands - the xx, Cath - Death Cab For Cutie,**

**Be nice and leave me a review?**

***peace out***


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